Past Research

Animacy and mythology in Hantxa Kuin (Cashinahua)

Cashinahua – or Hantxa Kuin as it is called by its speakers – belongs to the Panoan family. All Panoan languages are concentrated in one geographic region, the Amazonian lowlands in Eastern Peru and in adjacent parts of Brazil and Bolivia. The project aims at building up a comprehensive documentation of the Cashinahua language and culture at its current stage in Peru and in Brazil.

This a documentation is a contribution to the efforts of the respective Cashinahua communities and associations in both countries to preserve and fortify their language and culture. In addition, the annotated texts in the archive as well as the reappraisal of a corpus of historical and mythological texts assembled one hundred years ago by Capistrano de Abreu may become the basis for monolingual teaching material used by Cashinahua teachers in the village schools. The documentation will give an idea about Cashinahua way of life to a general audience, provide available data - including older material collected by Camargo and other researchers (esp. in Peru) - and the analyses. All of these will be electronically archived so that the Cashinahua themselves may have access to the materials, via the internet, from their associations in Brazilian and Peruvian towns.